Settlement Name Strata in the Multilingual Carpathian Basin

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Settlement Name Strata in the Multilingual Carpathian Basin

Title:

Settlement Name Strata in the Multilingual Carpathian Basin

Author:

Tóth, Valéria

Abstract:

When entering the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century, the Hungarians found a decisively Slavic population
on the territory, so toponyms were formed based on the already existing toponymic system. Hungarian
toponymic research has been able to reconstruct toponyms from the period prior to the Hungarian conquest
only very scarcely and ambiguously – as opposed to the names of larger rivers, which show strong
continuity, going back to very early times. The toponyms of the Carpathian Basin, in connection with the
formation of the settlement structures of Hungarians, can almost exclusively be documented from the
period after the Hungarian conquest.
However, the Carpathian Basin became a “meeting point of the peoples” in the centuries after the
conquest in 896 and as such, numerous nations and languages could be found here: Slavic peoples and
Germans settled in larger blocks, while smaller groups of Turkish nations, such as Cumans and Besenyős,
and some Romance peoples (Walloons, Romanians) also contributed to the ethnic and linguistic diversity in
the area. The layering of different peoples and languages influenced toponyms too, which also allows us to
investigate language contacts of the time. This is the main concern of my paper, with special focus on the
question of how these phenomena can be connected to issues of language prestige in the Middle Ages.